A Beholder is a monstrous creature in the game Dungeons & Dragons. Natalie Sideserf of Sideserf Cake Studio in Austin, Texas (previously), made this cake in the image of a Beholder. While it does not look quite as malevolent as its reputation implies, it is apparently much sweeter on the inside. You can see a detailed video on how she made this Beholder cake at Laughing Squid.

The Tasmanian devil is the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world since the thylacine went extinct in 1936. While Tasmanian devil fossils have been found in Australia, for the past 3,000 years the animal has only existed in the wild on the island of Tasmania. Until now. A group of devils has been relocated to the mainland in hopes they will thrive again.

The cause of Tasmanian devil’s disappearance from continental Australia is murky, with some evidence tying it overhunting by Indigenous Australians. Other signs point to the introduction of the dingo. Whatever the case, Monday’s news is part of an effort to bring the Tasmanian devil back to its former range. Aussie Ark, the group leading the reintroduction, has released 26 devils into a sanctuary in New South Wales near Barrington Tops National Park.

The sanctuary is enclosed and covers nearly 1,000 acres, giving the devils space to roam without impacting native wildlife outside the area. Each marsupial has been outfitted with a radio collar, and camera traps dot the sanctuary. That will allow scientists to study them in a somewhat controlled setting to see how they fare and interact with other wildlife.

Tasmanian devils are endangered, and disease has ravaged the population in Tasmania. It is hoped that the imported animals will be able to avoid the devil facial tumor disease on the island. Aussie Ark also hopes that the re-introduced devils may help to control the feral cat population. Read about the Tasmanian devils and their new home at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Aussie Ark)

You might recall the recent post about Helene Adelaide Shelby's ridiculous invention for scaring criminal suspects into confessing. Tom Scott saw it, too, and had to try it out. He actually built the device and invited some "suspects" to face it and see how they would react. Honestly, you can skip the first two minutes of this video and just get to the reactions. Can he pinpoint which suspect stole the cookie? -via Digg

Oh, you're going to love this, whether you are into the history of animation or just like to watch. A list of the animation sequences that advanced the art or brought something new to it is dangerously close to being a list of the best cartoons ever. The 100 sequences are not ranked, but instead are arranged in chronological order so you can follow the history of animation, beginning in 1892. There follows not one decade that didn't have an entry.     

All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern. If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench. “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,” the prominent experimental animator Norman McLaren (who makes the list with his short Neighbours, below) once explained. “Therefore, animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames.”

The best part is that the entries have videos, relevant clips if not the entire cartoon. You can read about each and how it contributed to the advancement of animation, or you can just watch them at Vulture. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Giacomo Gambineri)

In 18th-century France, one would be lucky to receive an education at all if he came from difficult circumstances, much less the education one really craved. Pierre André Latreille spent six years in a seminary to become a priest, when he really wanted to study bugs. Upon graduation, he never sought a parish nor did he preach, but instead learned about entomology and botany from several notable naturalists.   

Meanwhile, a major socio-political storm was brewing in France. People were fed up with the monarchy and the feudal system and rose in revolt. The Estates General took control of the Assembly and the peasants stormed Bastille, the symbol of Royal authority. Many aristocrats and members of the clergy were arrested, including King Louis XVI. A new law was passed that caused the immediate subordination of the Catholic Church to the French government. This law demanded that every priest take an oath of allegiance to the state.

Many Clergy refused to take the oath, because they couldn’t make themselves put their loyalty towards France before their loyalty towards God. Latreille was one of them, and consequently he was arrested and imprisoned. Soon, he would be exiled to a penal colony where death was certain.

So how did a beetle save Latreille's life? Read that story at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Pierre-Yves Beaudouin)

Trek B-Sides is a fan-made series of Star Trek: The Next Generation videos produced by re-editing episodes to isolate just the minor side plots we don't recall as well as we should.   

Uncovering the lost stories and forgotten side plots of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sometimes it just takes a little creative editing to change the context of a familiar story.

The results are mini-episodes that run from four to 15 minutes long. See a few select videos at Laughing Squid, and keep up with future episodes at Dailymotion.

Whether you are just learning to prepare food or you've been cooking for 50 years, there's always something new to learn. Professional chefs encounter everyday cooks who tend to make the same mistakes across the board, and many of them are willing to help the rest of us create tasty, satisfying dishes for ourselves. Read which mistakes they most want to correct.   

You throw all your ingredients together at once and mix them without thinking about their order. If you see butter (or any fat) and sugar listed first in a recipe, it’s a creaming method — which means you mix together the fat and sugar first, until it’s light and kind of airy. When you add the eggs, add them one by one to make sure they mix in well and so that your batter keeps its light texture.

If the recipe says an ingredient is supposed to be room temperature, make sure it’s room temperature! Eggs are particularly important for this rule — room temperature egg yolks break more easily and incorporate better into whatever you’re mixing. And for something like cheesecake, or anything else with high fat content, cold eggs can actually harden the fat and make your mixture lumpy.

Learn what to do about 30 of most common cooking mistakes in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Flickr user Lucia Sanchez)

Every book has to end somewhere. Science fiction authors try to make the final lines meaningful, either to leave the reader with a satisfying conclusion, or to give hope for the future, or maybe to set up a possibility of further adventures. Whether or not they mean anything to someone who hasn't read the entire book, you can tell they were meticulously thought out. But maybe they can mean something without the rest of the book.  

“Loose Ends” is a literary supercut composed entirely of last lines from 137 science fiction and fantasy books. After gathering these lines, I found they fell into a number of patterns—some surprising, others obvious—in how writers end their stories. With these patterns in hand, I arranged them into a sequence of interconnected vignettes. In these ways “Loose Ends” doubles as narrative and archive, short story and data analysis. To read a version that reveals the names of the books, click here. —Tom Comitta

The story Comitta constructed makes sense altogether, if you ignore the varying names, and it also makes you wonder what came before. Read "Loose Ends" at Wired. -via Kottke

(Image credit: Elena Lacey)

Here we are in October, when we traditionally manage to dedicate an entire month to Halloween. One thing you'll notice is the prevalence of horror films, both new and old. But what if you aren't really into horror, but still want to celebrate the season? Mental Floss has a list of movies centered around Halloween and its themes that don't fit into the horror genre. Many are comedies, some are adventure, some are even animated! Bonus: the trailers for each are included.

Château de Brézé is a perfectly lovely 16th-century French castle near the village of Brézé. It was built over the foundations of an earlier fortress, one that sported a deep moat and an underground bunker system consisting of numerous rooms and three kilometers of tunnels that connect them.  

The underground refugee is accessible from within the moat; the entrance tunnel being dug on the moat face. The underground quarters, designed like a fortress, would have made it possible for the Maillé-Brézé family to defend itself against enemy attacks, as well as escape harsh winters and even epidemics. In times of need, they would have quickly abandoned the castle above and retreated into their subterranean refugee. Among the maze of corridors, there was every conceivable luxury including bedrooms, bakeries, cellars, kitchens, as well as room for livestock and cattle, and stables for horses. For defense, holes were carved into the walls of the corridors through which the castle defenders could shoot arrows into approaching intruders without exposing themselves. Fortunately for the Breze family, they never had to find out whether their defenses were adequate because the castle was never sieged.

Take a visual tour of this ancient and unique underground refuge at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Martin Burns)

Viola Brand is an artistic cyclist in Germany. Here she takes over the ballroom of a castle to dance with her bike and show us the things we will never, ever be able to do. -via Nag on the Lake

Ida Schnell was a young nursemaid, taking care of infants in her hometown of Munich. She was only 13, but was described as appearing older, and none too bright. Schnell moved from job to job because the babies she cared for kept dying.

No one suspected the young teen of the deaths of their children until after the funeral of the 6th infant that died in her care. Each one had died sudden and mysterious deaths within six months and all under her care.

It was decided that they would exhume the body of the last victim, a 14-day-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Bichler of Ampermoching. The investigation revealed that the baby had been killed. The death was caused by a perforation of the child's soft skull with a sharp instrument.

The sad fact is that many infants died in that era; it was just a fact of life. Another sad fact was that this nursemaid killed babies for the simple reason that she did not want to hear them cry. Read an overview of the case at Murders in History, or for a more in-depth look, here are five contemporary newspaper accounts that tell the story. -via Strange Company

The all-you-can-eat buffet of America’s prolific fast food chains is a
thing of the past, though sometimes it feels more like a dream https://t.co/FSpyN2ql5s

— Eater (@Eater) September 29, 2020

Fast food began in the mid 20th century with the idea of walking in and picking up hamburgers and fries that were already made, but fresh because that was the only thing on the menu. In the 1980s and '90s, casual restaurants offered all-you-can-eat buffets, which became so popular that eventually fast food chains jumped on the idea. But the concept was experimental, never universal, and didn't last long. Now people can barely remember ever seeing a fast food buffet. Have you ever been to a McDonald's outlet that had food out for patrons to pick up as much as they wanted?  MM Carrigan found that stories of such buffets are few and far between, and corporate offices tend to not talk about them.      

McDonald’s isn’t the only chain with a buffet whose existence is hazy. Yum Brands, the overlord of fast-food holy trinity Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, is said to have had buffets at all three restaurants. I confirm nothing, however, when I reach out to the corporate authorities. On the KFC side, a spokesperson offers to look into “some historical information,” but doesn’t get back to me. My contact at Taco Bell tells me, “I’ll look into it. Certainly, nothing in existence today. I’ve never heard of it. Looks like there are a couple threads on Reddit.”

Reddit, of course, speculates a possible Mandela Effect — the phenomenon of a group of unrelated people remembering a different event than what actually occurred — in the existence of Taco Bell buffets. But I have a firmer lead in Payel Patel, a doctor who studied at Johns Hopkins, who tells me there was a Taco Bell Express in her dorm that was included in an all-you-can-eat meal plan option, though it only lasted one fleeting year. “You could order anything, like 15 nachos and 11 bean burritos,” she says, “and they would make it and give it to you, and you walked off without paying a cent.” A Johns Hopkins student newsletter published in 2001 corroborates the existence of the utopian all-you-can-eat Taco Bell, saying, “you can also gorge yourself on some good old Taco Bell tacos and burritos. Don’t forget, it’s all-you-can-eat. Just don’t eat too much; you don’t want to overload the John.”

While I had heard about fast food buffets in the past, I only encountered one in 2019 at a KFC in a tiny town at a sparse interstate exit. At the time, I quipped that the outlet would go bankrupt if anyone knew about it. Read about the rise and fall of the ephemeral (and possibly apocryphal) fast food buffet at Eater. -via Metafilter

The space telescope CHEOPS has detected some really wild data about an exoplanet 322 light years away. The planet is named WASP-189b, and it orbits the star HD 133112. At least that's what they are known by now; better names will come along sooner or later. Monika Lendl of the University of Geneva tells us how weird this planet really is.   

"WASP-189b is especially interesting because it is a gas giant that orbits very close to its host star. It takes less than three days for it to circle its star, and it is 20 times closer to the star than Earth is to the Sun," Monika Lendl says. The planet is more than 1.5 times as large as Jupiter, the largest planet of the solar system.

Monika Lendl further explains that planetary objects like WASP-189b are very exotic: "They have a permanent day side, which is always exposed to the light of the star, and, accordingly, a permanent night side." This means that its climate is completely different from that of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system. "Based on the observations using CHEOPS, we estimate the temperature of WASP-189b to be 3,200 degrees Celsius. Planets like WASP-189b are called "ultra-hot Jupiters. Iron melts at such a high temperature, and even becomes gaseous. This object is one of the most extreme planets we know so far," says Lendl.

The star it orbits is pretty extreme, too. Read about the findings from CHEOPS at PhysOrg. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: ESA)

Everyone is a fan of something, even if it's just the nightly local news broadcast. Most of us have a movie, TV series, video game, or band that we really enjoy, whether we admit to it or not. Come to think of it, being a fan of the local nightly news is one that people would want to hide. You probably know I am partial to The Walking Dead and Star Wars, even when they are subpar. Celebrities are the same.

Read up on 15 celebrities and the unexpected pop culture they love at Cracked.